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Willie Mays
Baseball Hall of Fame
Piper and I would sit on the bench and he'd say, "This guy is going to knock you down. Don't worry about it," he said. "He's trying to scare you." He'd say, "This guy hits this way." He and I had a sign. His sign was behind his back, only with the hand, again, left or right. That's the way the guy's going to pitch. Because he was the manager and he used to call almost all the pitches, so he knew exactly what to do. So, Piper had the first influence on me to be patient and to learn because I wasn't old enough to understand about playing with guys that were 25. Some was older, some pushed their age back, so they might have been older than what I'm saying, but they was all grown. I'm out there by myself. I'm probably the youngest of all the teams around the league I'm talking about.
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Willie Mays
Baseball Hall of Fame
Willie Mays: In the South you only had certain things you could do. If you didn't play a sport, what could we do? When baseball season was over, we played basketball till 11 or 12 o'clock at night. Baseball season, we played 'til late afternoon. Football we played -- especially in the summer -- you could play up to around eight -- nine o'clock. So we played every day. I used to play on the high school team, and then go play sandlot ball on Sundays, without any shoulder pads and things. We didn't have no shoes, I used to kick barefooted. You know, 50 -- 60 yards. I used to kick the ball hard, you know. I didn't kick-off too much without shoes. I used to kick it, but on the side -- spiral.
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Craig McCaw
Pioneer of Telecommunications
I had a particular English teacher who was wont to challenge me in the learning of Macbeth. And as a result of that, I think I memorized more passages of Macbeth than anyone would ever want to know. But to this day, those beat heavily in my mind as I think about processes and about Macbeth's whole sort of philosophical relationship to opportunity and the good and evil that he failed to comprehend, and as it were control his most base instincts. And that ultimately destroyed him. And I must say that whole process with that professor was very powerful to me.
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Craig McCaw
Pioneer of Telecommunications
I think people who understand both science and philosophy, anthropology, whatever, really are going to be benefited the most. And I've always been rather negative about studying the specific aspects of business in school. I always have felt that business schools, which are too disciplined, create wonderful bureaucrats. And bureaucrats are important, but if you really want to make a contribution I think you need to be open to the possibilities.
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Frank McCourt
Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Frank McCourt: I learned to drop the mask. I went into the classroom as -- my only models were Irish school masters and I thought I'd go in there and I'd roar at the kids in McKee Vocational High School the way the masters roared at us. It didn't work. "Yo, teach, why you talking like that?" And they were talking to me. I'm the school master, "Yo, teach," and I had to stop this. I had to find some other way of dealing with the kids, of running the classes, and I found eventually the only way to deal with them was to be honest, to just try to get to them. I didn't know how. I found it very difficult to even deal with people on a one to one basis because we put up so many defenses when we were kids. And we were so angry all the time that even in the one-to-one situation in New York, if somebody disagreed with me, it got my Irish up so to speak, and I'd get angry. I couldn't realize that this is a person who just wanted to discuss something. I thought they were opposing me and that would lead to fisticuffs. "Would you like to step outside?" So it took me a long, long time to get over that. And it was only through the teaching I learned to put this anger aside and not to take it personally when the kids would erupt. You know, when you have 150 or 170 high school kids every day there will be eruptions, and they get angry and they direct it at the teacher, but it's not at the teacher. It's something they brought from home. You know, you can get all psychological about this, but I learned not to take it personally. I learned not to be quite impassive over it, but to understand what was happening in the classroom. That was the beginning of my education.
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Frank McCourt
Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Kids were asking me about my life, and I would dole out a few anecdotes, and they kept saying, "Oh, you should write a book. You should write a book." And I thought I should write a book, and I was trying. And every summer I would try to write the book and you need -- You can't do it. It's like running a marathon. You can't say, "Oh, I'm going to run the marathon." You have to, nine months in advance at least, start training. And it's the same thing with writing. You have to get the rhythms, and you have to, above all, find the voice, and it took me all those years, not until I retired. But I had the material. That's the main thing. The material was circling around my head and lying there in my notebooks waiting to be tapped.
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Frank McCourt
Pulitzer Prize for Biography
I wish I could say again that I was like James Joyce, who worked things out, or Hemingway, who just sculpted those sentences. For me, it was my method of writing that led me to it. Sitting with a notebook and a pen writing on the right-hand page whatever story I wanted to tell, and making notes on the left-hand page about ideas coming to me for future reference. And I wrote 19 or 20 pages of Angela's Ashes which is in the past tense, describing my mother and father coming to New York. And on the left page I wrote one day -- I knew the next day I wanted to get to my earliest memories and start my story. My story. And I wrote, "I'm in a playground on Claussen Avenue in Brooklyn with my brother, Malachy. He's two. I'm three. We're on the seesaw. He goes up. I go down. He goes up. I go down. I get off. Malachy comes down, crashes, bites his tongue and there's blood." That was my earliest memory. And the next day I picked that up in the present tense with the perspective of the three-year old, me, and it felt comfortable and I continued that way. I just -- it was a glove that I put on.
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